Personal health devices compliant with ISO/IEEE 11073 standards can communicate with each other using ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 communication protocol. ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 standard defines two entities, called “agent” and “manager”. An agent is a node that collects and transmits personal health data to an associated manager. The manager is a node that receives data from one or more agents. Examples of managers include a cellular phone, health monitor gateway, set top box of computer system. ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 standard defines the data formats from the various health care parameters and the communication protocol used between ISO 11073-20601 agent and ISO 11073-20601 manager.
As part of the ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards for medical and health device communication, the ISO/IEEE 11073-20601 optimized exchange protocol defines a common framework for making an abstract model of personal health data available in transport-independent transfer syntax. The transfer syntax includes the methods required to establish logical connections between devices and to provide presentation capabilities and services needed to perform communication tasks. The protocol is optimized to personal health usage requirements.
Near field communication, or NFC, allows for simplified transactions, data exchange, and wireless connections between two devices in close proximity to each other, usually by no more than a few centimeters. The Near Field Communication Forum (NFC Forum) formed in 2004 promotes sharing, pairing, and transactions between NFC devices and develops and certifies device compliance with NFC standards.
Health data is exchanged as IEEE 11073-20601 optimized exchange protocol application protocol data units (APDUs) encapsulated in Near field communication (NFC) Forum data exchange format (NDEF) records.
To facilitate communication, a manager (NFC reader device) must constantly test if new NDEF data is available from an agent (NFC tag device).
It is object of the invention to facilitate the test for new data from the NFC tag device.
The object is solved by a near field communication reader device, a near field communication tag device, a near field communication system and a near field communication method according to claims 1, 5, 9 and 10, respectively. Details of the invention will become more apparent from the following description of embodiments in the connection with the accompanying drawings.